I've just read this article on The Guardian's website and it details the kind of faults that lecturers have to battle with everyday:

*'insemination of these cows at the age of 3 with their fathers seamen.'

*'occcurs', 'ocour', 'occurence', 'occuring', 'occured' and 'occures'

Even (some) Oxford University students can't spell and are hopeless at punctuation I thought that was near impossible!

Urgh.

That's basically down to laziness on their part I would imagine. I think its just so easy to click the spell-checker and sit back with a cigar. Sadly, things like grammar and basic comprehension are completely lost on some people nowadays.

(Original post by gaijin)
That's basically down to laziness on their part I would imagine. I think its just so easy to click the spell-checker and sit back with a cigar. Sadly, things like grammar and basic comprehension are completely lost on some people nowadays.

Automatic spell check A wonderful thing except for when you want to continue after a quote and it keeps capitalizing the first letter

The examples in the Guardian are nothing compared to some of the scripts my partner has to mark - and these are scripts by English students, not geneticists at Imperial. I remember last year in a staff meeting one of his colleagues pausing to say, with utmost gravitas, 'We are now about to award an English degree to a student we all consider to be functionally illiterate'. It was a sad day not only for the language, but for universities too. The university is now having to set up basic literacy classes for first years because their schools have let them down so much; all this does is lower the general standard, and alienate the few remaining students who ARE good writers, and who find that going to university means taking a compulsory course in identifying verbs in sentences and knowing the apostrophe rule. It's a shambles. And it's something all universities are having to deal with, Oxford and Cambridge as much as any other.

Surely poor handwriting (like mine) is more of an obstacle to lecturers than poor spelling and grammar, it's merely a less respectable target because some pedants can't write properly either. I'm not saying that it's fine for standards of spelling and grammar to slip, but perhaps teaching people to write legibly is equally important?

(Original post by Kyle_S-C)
Surely poor handwriting (like mine) is more of an obstacle to lecturers than poor spelling and grammar, it's merely a less respectable target because some pedants can't write properly either. I'm not saying that it's fine for standards of spelling and grammar to slip, but perhaps teaching people to write legibly is equally important?

Depends though.

I'm not allowed to hand in any handwritten work, all my essays have to be typed. Exams are the only handwritten work that we do and you if your writing is not legible, you are pulled up on it.

I'm not allowed to hand in any handwritten work, all my essays have to be typed. Exams are the only handwritten work that we do and you if your writing is not legible, you are pulled up on it.

It's always preferable for things to be typed I think (there are even special provisions allowing people to use word processors in exams in the event of extremely poor handwriting). I still think that handwriting is the single most important factor in written communication though. It doesn't matter how you spell a word if nobody can tell what letters you used anyway.

I think that a lot are guilty of poor spelling, not helped by SPG losing importance in exams and text language becoming common place. I am finding it very common that forums warn and even suspend members that continue to write in text.

Must be a universal thing, too: We don't learn grammar at school as part of the curriculum. It really should be in there. This year we are studying two plays, twelve famous speeches, five Wordsworth poems, one terrible piece of prose by David Malouf, a set of seven stimulus texts related to 'Inner Journey,' and on top of that four to six related materials we find ourselves and analyse. We will have to produce four essays on these in our final exams, over a total of about 2 hours 40 minutes. The problem is that we only learn grammar because our english teacher is one of the best I've ever had and actually makes an effort to teach it. I'm sure there are more than 50 people in my year alone that don't know how to use its and it's properly. We learn more about english in german lessons than in english.

(Original post by sugar-pie)
Every time the government tries to change the education system they screw it up a little more.

This is a little off topic, but we actually don't need to do aboriginal history 4 years in a row. What happened to the rest of the world?

Yes indeed. I just saw your post about your experiences in English classes. It is the same here, they should focus on getting the fundamentals of spelling and grammar right before devoting so much time learning Shakespeare's plays and other novels which will be forgotten. Many people will not study English any more after secondary school so it's important to get it right there.

Regarding aboriginal history, that does seem excessive. Perhaps it has to do with (correct me if I'm wrong) the problems of integrating aboriginal Australians fully in society and bringing their level of opportunities up? Perhaps those who set the curriculum feel it will help create the understanding needed in order to do this?

(Original post by Agamemnon)
Yes indeed. I just saw your post about your experiences in English classes. It is the same here, they should focus on getting the fundamentals of spelling and grammar right before devoting so much time learning Shakespeare's plays and other novels which will be forgotten. Many people will not study English any more after secondary school so it's important to get it right there.

Regarding aboriginal history, that does seem excessive. Perhaps it has to do with (correct me if I'm wrong) the problems of integrating aboriginal Australians fully in society and bringing their level of opportunities up? Perhaps those who set the curriculum feel it will help create the understanding needed in order to do this?

It is to an extent, as the previous generations would not even have learned about the Myall Creek Massacre. It is ridiculous, though, to spend the whole of junior high school history lessons on this topic. We did a little on Ancient Greece and China in year 8. It would have been great to continue learning interesting stuff. The government were trying to be PC, I beleive.

(Original post by sugar-pie)
We learn more about english in german lessons than in english.

Oh snap! I learned most of what I know about grammar from having gotten an A in Spanish (favorite subject, that's why!). I honestly cannot remember having learned how to use the apostrophe in school. I learned punctuation from reading books in my spare time. However, I do remember, one time, being pulled up at school for not knowing the difference between 'of' and 'off' (okay, I'm talking about spelling now...) because I'd mistaken the two in an essay. The only thing was, that was the most basic of spelling mistakes that I was slightly embarrassed that they didn't cotton on that it was a mistake. I still write 'there' instead of 'their' and so on. It's just slightly insulting when a teacher, who knows your capability, thinks "uh oh, she can't spell either"; no, actually I can! It was my hand that got confused, not my mind!

It's unfortunate that I'm doing a degree in English Literature and, a couple of weeks ago, a lecturer told me that he'd had to send a few of my class to extra classes to learn how to use grammar and punctuation. I don't get it. You have all the lessons you need in the books you're reading!

We were taught grammar and punctuation at school, but I think we were the exception rather than the rule. In many schools, so much time revolves round meeting targets for the National Curriculum and the SATS that there's no time for the basics to be taught. Yet, with so many pupils in schools who are newly arrived to this country and who are learning English as a second or even third language, you'd think the government would wake up and realise that we need to teach basic spelling and grammar rules more than ever!!